Doctors Collaborating On New Research At Dallas Cancer Symposium

DALLAS (CBSDFW) – They are two words that sound good together: cancer and vaccine.

Some of the world’s top researchers gathered at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas this week to collaborate for the first time in a team effort to develop one.

Michelle Berndt is about celebrate one year of being cancer free. But she’s more worried about her children who don’t even have the disease. “Even though I’m through cancer and this February I’ll be a one year survivor, this journey’s not over.”

The 31-year-old comes from four generations of women diagnosed with breast cancer. There’s a good chance her six-year-old daughter will also get it. “I’m praying something is developed, so I have high hopes for the vaccinations.”

That hope is in the hands of these doctors who met this week in Dallas and include Nobel prize winners.

The Texas Cancer Vaccine Symposium is a collaboration between Baylor and Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to start sharing research and speed up development for a possible cure.

“You sit there and you listen and you get ideas and say what if we do this and its going to give us new ideas so it stimulates new ideas,” says Sammons Cancer Center director Dr. Alan Miller.

Clinical trials in labs have shown success, and these stars in the field of oncology believe a breakthrough is just around the corner for so many families like the Berndts.

The symposium will be held every year and alternate between Houston and Dallas.

J.D. is an award-winning reporter who has been covering North Texas for CBS 11 since 1996. He began his career in Longview and also worked as a reporter in Johnson City, Tennessee and Tulsa, Oklahoma. But he's a native Texan who was born in Dall...